Stranger Than We Can Imagine by John Higgs

Author:John Higgs [Higgs, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-3848-8
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2015-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

Live performance art in Soho, New York, 1970 (Jill Freedman/Getty)

TEN: SEX

Nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me)

In turbulent periods of history a person can go from being a conservative, to a dangerous radical, to an embarrassing reactionary, without once changing their ideas. This is what happened to the English palaeobotanist Dr Marie Stopes in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Marie’s mother, the Shakespeare scholar Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, was the first woman in Scotland to take a university certificate. This was at a time when women were not allowed to attend lectures or receive degrees. Charlotte wrote many academic works on Shakespeare but her most successful book was British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege (1894), which was an inspiration to the twentieth-century suffragette movement. Charlotte was a strong feminist who campaigned for women’s suffrage.

Unlike her mother, Marie Stopes didn’t initially appear to be academically inclined. Her formal education only began at the age of twelve, when she was sent away to a suffragist-founded Edinburgh boarding school. But despite her late start she applied herself and eventually enrolled at the Botanical Institute at Munich University. She was, at first, the only woman among five thousand men. From here, at the age of twenty-four, she surpassed her mother’s academic achievements and attained her doctorate. Dr Stopes became a recognised expert in plant fossils, and seemed on course to a life dedicated to the study of coal.

Like her mother, Marie was a great believer in female education and political equality. But while Charlotte was in favour of the radical activism promoted by Emmeline Pankhurst, Marie preferred more conservative suffragists. Pankhurst was exasperated by the failure of the women’s suffrage movement to produce tangible results in the nineteenth century, so she advocated the confrontational approach now known as direct action. Her followers shouted down politicians, chained themselves to railings, and committed arson. They threw stones through the windows of Buckingham Palace which were attached to notes explaining that ‘Constitutional methods being ignored drive us to window smashing.’ The death of Emily Davison, who was trampled to death at the Epsom Derby after stepping in front of a horse owned by King George V, became the defining image of Pankhurst’s direct-action movement.

For Marie Stopes, this was all a bit much. Both she and her mother agreed that women needed the vote. They understood that this would lead to equality in a whole range of areas, from female-instigated divorce to tax status. Their difference of opinion was down to temperament. Marie did not think that direct action was in any way ladylike. She was not initially persuaded by her mother’s argument that a lady who found a burglar in her house would be quite correct in hitting them over the head with a broom, so this was also correct behaviour for women who had been robbed of their political rights.

Yet there was one area where Marie was more radical than Charlotte, and that was sexually. Charlotte was the product of a society where wives were obliged

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